Eating Animals

Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is the groundbreaking moral examination of vegetarianism, farming, and the food we eat every day that inspired the documentary of the same name.

Bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his life oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. For years he was content to live with uncertainty about his own dietary choices-but once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.

Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.

Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer “at the table with our greatest philosophers” -and a must-read for anyone who cares about building a more humane and healthy world.

Published on January 22 2018

What's Inside

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Eating Animals. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages. Everything Is Illuminated received a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award, and was made into a film by Liev Schreiber. Foer lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss, and their children.

Nathan Englander is the author of the novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, the play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Rachel Silver.

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Reviews for Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

"Eating Animals isn't just an anti-meat screed, or an impassioned case for vegetarianism. Instead, Foer tells a story that is part memoir and part investigative report....It's a book that takes America's meat-dominated diet to task."―NPR, All Things Considered

"Eating Animals carefully, deliberately, takes you through every relevant dimension of factory farming....One sees it from the inside, the outside, the moral high ground, the dithering consumer level, through Foer's family stories, from slaughterhouse workers, animal behaviorists, even from defenders of the system....Foer's aim is not to make your choice, but to inform it. He has done us all a great service, and we, and the animals, owe him our thanks."―Andrew Weil, MD

"Foer's case for ethical vegetarianism is wholly compelling....A blend of solid--and discomforting--reportage with fierce advocacy that will make committed carnivores squeal."―Kirkus Reviews

"A work of moral philosophy....The fact that Foer makes me wonder whether I'm being, at best, a hypocrite every time I eat a piece of beef suggests he's completely successful in at least one ambition." ―Geoff Nicholson, San Francisco Chronicle

"Foer's book raises critical ethical questions we all need to face....We shouldn't be polluting the planet to satisfy our appetites."―Huffington Post

"Eating Animals stands as a pop-cultural landmark, destined to be the starting point for a lot of overdue conversations." ―Philadelphia Daily News

"For a hot young writer to train his sights on a subject as unpalatable as meat production and consumption takes raw nerve. What makes Eating Animals so unusual is vegetarian Foer's empathy for human meat eaters, his willingness to let both factory farmers and food reform activists speak for themselves, and his talent for using humor to sweeten a sour argument."―O, The Oprah Magazine

"A postmodern version of Peter Singer's 1975 manifesto Animal Liberation.... Foer is the latest in a long line of distinguished literary vegetarians."―Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times Book Review